LGAM Knowledge Base

The program for the 2010 Local Government Information Technology Conference has just been released. More information can be found on the conference website - http://it2010.coffsharbour.nsw.gov.au/

Last week the site was visited 1590 times which is a new record, and the weekly visits graph is definitely starting to trend upwards. Hopefully this will translate into more contributors and an even better site.

22 new members joined the site in August, bringing the total to 275.

As of 31 August, the site has been visited on a total of 38,689 occasions and 165,320 pages have been viewed.
The site was visited almost 6,000 times in the last month, which is by far the most visits in a single month in the history of the site.

Another 95 pages were added to the site in August, bringing the grand total to 3,016

The home page has been modified slightly. The Image of the Day has been replaced by an Image of the Moment which changes every few minutes. The image of the moment will showcase the photos in the photo library.

The LGAM Photo Library is starting to come along nicely, following contributions from the following Councils and organisations.

• Bundaberg Regional Council
• Canning City Council
• Mildura Rural City Council
• Waverley Council
• Earthco Projects Pty Ltd

Hello, Everyone.

We have commenced a new study for local councils – we are looking into utilization of Business Intelligence (BI) technologies. The requirement for open government puts additional pressure on local councils to re-evaluate and improve their BI capabilities. However, the deployment and adoption of BI is particularly challenging for local councils as their needs and objectives differ markedly from those of traditional users of BI technologies. This first of its kind study will provide comparative peer data based on actual experiences of local councils with different BI solutions (internally developed spreadsheets vs BI built into ERP vs enterprise BI) and will enable local councils to better evaluate their options and strategies. If you wish to participate, please e-mail to service(at)tech-indicators.com.au or visit our website for more details -> http://www.tech-indicators.com.au/studies. Leila Abbasova, Technology Indicators

According to a recent article, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) is encouraging government (& presumably local government) people to work collaboratively in externally hosted environments - which is exactly what this site is. It is fantastic that the federal government is being so supportive of this sort of open collaboration.

Just finished putting together a Newsletter. I am intending to send it to every Australian Council over the next month or so. I hope it will help persuade a few CEOs of the site's potential, and convince them to encourage their staff to use and contribute to the site. If all goes well, I would like to send out a new newsletter every six months. Any feedback about the newsletter, or future content suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

The LGAM Glossary now contains over 550 definitions, and is growing rapidly. For anyone who wants to be able to use the glossary whilst offline, updated versions in a number of formats are now available.

• PDF Document
• Word Document
• Open Document

6 new members joined the site in June, bringing the total to 238.

As of 30 June, the site has been visited on a total of 29,008 occasions and 138,113 pages have been viewed.

Another 146 pages were added to the site in June, bring the grand total to 2,279

An LGAM User Survey page has just been added to the site.

If you have 5 minutes to spare, and you would be willing to participate, it would be greatly appreciated.

13 new members joined the site in May, bringing the total to 232.

As of 31 May, 17,372 different people have visited the site on a total of 25,911 occasions and viewed 129,579 pages.

As the Google Analytics graph below shows, the number of people visiting the site has increased considerably over the past few months.

Google has just opened up Google Wave to everyone. When it was originally released to a limited number of people for beta testing everyone was very excited about it, but after about a week or two it was being written off as a dud. I suspect there will be a resurgence in interest in it, now that it has been opened up, and that in a year or two people will be using for all sorts of things. I'm intending to set up public waves for interesting LGAM pages for anyone interested in discussing the content in a neutral forum to do so. I'm also going to try and use Wave to try and hold virtual meetings on Local Government related issues on a regular basis. If anyone has any suggestions for discussion topics please leave a comment here.

Speaking opportunities at spatial@gov conference are available. More info is on the CeBIT website http://www.cebit.com.au/2010/conferences/spatial-at-gov

A study into Mobile & Flexible working in local government agencies is underway. Participating local councils will receive a complimentary benchmarking/research report (due late June 2010).

If interested, contact www.tech-indicators.com.au

Just stumbled across a nice American website called Pavement Guide Interactive, which contains heaps of information about road pavements. Looks to be a good free resource for anyone interested in road pavements.

The website's address is: http://training.ce.washington.edu/PGI/

This is actually fairly old news, but I thought it may be of interest. There are a few terms that you can search for using Google, that will return a LGAM Knowledge Base page as the first hit. "Highlift Pump Station" is one example. Go on - do a Google search on the term and see what happens. Also if you do a search for lgam + any other term, say "LGAM Road" you will get a whole lot of hits on pages from the site. This means you can use Google to search the site with out having to visit it. Backtracking a bit, if you did the search for "Highlift Pump Station" you will notice the page is a bit bare, so if you know a little about the subject, please consider adding to the page. It seems a shame to have the number one Google search spot and not make the most of it.

Happy Googling

9 new members joined the site in April, bringing the total to 219.

As of 30 April, 14,405 different people have visited on a total of 22,344 occasions and viewed 119,260 pages.

As the graph below shows, the number of people visiting the site has increased considerably over the last couple of months.

An Italian inventor has recently sucessfully tested the prototype of a machine that may eventually have a huge impact on a number of Council functions.
The machine is 3D sandstone/marble printer nown as the D-shape. It has the ability to automatically build large monolithic sandstone and marble structures from a CAD drawing. According to the D-Shape Website its Civil Engineering applications include: Bridge portions, road portions, tube sections, pillars portions, stone floating, harbor sections, marina furnishing, variable section beams and columns, Water depuration, insulation plates. It is easy to imagine in 10 or 20 years time, that Councils will be receiving applications from people wanting to build dwellings and commercial premises using this technology, and perhaps even Council having a D-Shape truck in their fleet that is used for any number of construction jobs. Have a look at the site. The future is almost here!!